


Time On Tears

by revolutionarygold



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, also sort of an exploration of current politics and the political atmosphere as it stands, eliza gettin stuff done, the author enjoys writing academic papers too much, who lives who dies who tells your story modern au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-18 01:52:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9360305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revolutionarygold/pseuds/revolutionarygold
Summary: At the end of the day, Elizabeth Hamilton is a widow. At the end of week, her husband is in the ground.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure: I am horrible at actually finishing fics. So this will almost certainly be sporadic, but I've been writing on this story for too long to /not/ share it. So here is my modern AU of "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story" because Eliza is the literal best.

****At the end of the day, Elizabeth Hamilton is a widow. At the end of week, her husband is in the ground.  
With her children bunched close to their mother - Angie holding Lizzie, Eliza holding Pip, Alex with his younger brothers pressed close - Eliza buried her head in Pip’s hair, breathing in the scent of her baby, of her son.

The plot is next to Phillip’s. It would become the family plot, then. The ground where all Hamiltons would be buried - decades from now, God willing.

She did not cry. It wasn’t for a lack of emotion. It felt like there was a piece of her - like her left leg, or perhaps her right arm - that had suddenly disappeared. No one - not Burr, not the doctors, not the police - was able to explain why her husband had died. Why someone had taken issue with his comments on the New York gubernatorial election, someone who had followed her husband and the losing candidate, someone who had put a 9mm round between her husband’s third and fourth rib, shaken Burr’s hand, and left.  
They would find him. Police work was getting shockingly accurate.

But they still wouldn’t be able to explain _why._

* * *

It feels just like it did when Phillip died.

Angie is unable to process, Alex shoulders more responsibility than his teenage frame should be able to carry, John and James rely on each other, William takes it upon himself to entertain Lizzy, and there’s a baby who will never remember the deceased.  
And Angelica stays in the Hamilton home for weeks.  
  
Eliza doesn’t sleep. _Now_ the tears come, and some days all she can do is flip through his phone - listening to voice memos to himself, to Alex, to herself, watching videos, hearing his laugh-  
Alexander Hamilton had done so much to her life. For better and for worse, he had changed her just like he had change the world.

Two weeks after Alexander breathed his last (after hours of conversation through what frankly looked like excruciating pain) Eliza found his halfway finished projects.  
It was a letterbox, so similar to his other letter boxes - the ones that still protected all their correspondence while he was deployed. While those boxes had a look of age to them, though, this one looked like Alexander would come in any moment and pick up where he had left off.  
He’d always been particular about anyone reading something before it was done, so Eliza put the box back on his desk and rushed out of the study. Someone - it was hard to tell from this far away, but probably William - was crying. She was still a mother.

* * *

Later that night, though, the children were asleep. For now, at least.

Eliza couldn’t find sleep as easily. And it was different than just missing her husband’s presence on the other side of the bed. After a minute, she realized that she was curious. She was curious about what Alexander had been working on before he died.  
With a sigh, Eliza swung her legs out of bed, wrapping Alexander’s robe around her shoulders before she stood to shuffle over to Alex’s study. She eased herself into the chair, moving the box back in front of her. This time, when she opened it, it felt less like an invasion of privacy and more like an invitation to his world.  
They were sorted, presumably, by subject. So Eliza pulled the front one and started leafing through the papers he’d paper clipped together.

_The fact of the matter is, no matter how much public outcry there is about racism on college campuses, until there is a distinct, unified course of action laid out - by some governmental agency, activist group, or otherwise - nothing will change. While the people are sufficiently angry, they are not sufficiently engaged._

There was another paragraph under that one that had been crossed out and then scribbled over in a fit of irritation. The sheet of paper behind it is dated a week later and is shorter. Behind that is a flattened piece of paper that had been crumpled and then saved, and then a few sheets of paper that had been ripped in half and yet still saved. There was a napkin with an inexplicable diagram on it - presumably an outline, but with Alexander, it could be anything.

All his stops and starts were labelled with a date - a range of dates for longer drafts - and Eliza knew that college violence made Alexander mad, but had it pissed him off to the point that he’d written about it for nearly six months?  
She put the paper clips back on their stack and pulled out the next ream of papers.

Eliza didn’t sleep at all that night. She had to move from the desk - and Alex had an impressively large desk - to the floor so she could spread everything out and not get it mixed up with each other.  
What was fascinating to her, though, was how much of their lives had been intertwined in his politics. Eliza knew that their children were why Alex wanted to save the world - to make the world safer for their beautiful children - but they’d always worked so hard to keep their kids out of his politics.

But here it was, on a sheet of notebook paper, yellowed with age, dated a month after Angie’s birth, she read about income inequality ( _“...that my infant daughter, who has nothing but wonder and joy to give to the world, will certainly earn less over her lifetime than her brother despite how hard both of them will surely work fills me with a rage that all fathers to daughter should feel. That our Congress - filled with fathers and brothers - can ignore these feelings is baffling, just as baffling as the concept that male leaders need to think of women as somebody’s before they are given worth, instead of having it born within them as human being…”_ ).

On a stack of pages ripped from a composition notebook that had been stapled together, dated the _day_ that AJ came out to them if she wasn’t missing her mark, he had ranted for several pages about homosexuality in the military, being strangely vocal about his own military history: _“As a child, Alex assured me that he would grow up to be a soldier, just like his father. As he’s growing up, he’s growing to look more and more like he who sired him, and he’s as opinionated as his father, but that is not is only similarity: my third child, second son, is not heterosexual. That this could bar him from the service to his country that he has and continues to dream of since he was four years old and asking what I did before law school is a ridiculous relic from our past, one that calls back to the Cult of Domesticity or segregation or poll taxes. As a bisexual veteran, I can attest that my sexuality had nothing to do with my capacity to serve. If you won’t take it from the scientific community, take it from the former Secretary of the Treasury.”_

If there was a way to publish that particular segment without embarrassing AJ or outing him before he was comfortable, Eliza would have done it yesterday.

And it went on. Federal standardization of welfare. Harsher standards for police officers. Increasing the amount of federal grants for college education. Increasing veteran’s benefits with a special outreach to homeless vets. (Those two were the hardest to sift through, because Alex with that brilliant mind and pen of his often forgot that they didn’t all hold PhDs in economics). Several calls to withdraw from the Middle East.

The most emotional were the ones that pleaded, because she couldn’t even pretend that these were academic essays, not with her daughters asleep in the room over from where she was sitting, with Congress and the judiciary and the public itself to take rape and sexual assault more seriously.  
Alex was called many things. Most of them were correct. Many weren’t strong enough in their descriptions of him. But anyone that called him a distant or unfeeling father was just flat wrong.

There were less argumentative things, in the very back. Memoirs of his service, some letters between Lafayette and John and Hercules in the few times that the four men had been split up. The original draft of his very first essay, the one that got him the scholarship to Columbia. The one that started this whole journey.  
This essay was where it had really started. The wheels in Eliza’s head were turning, creaking as they did because it had been a while since she’d really worked on something that wasn’t a fundraiser or a baby shower or third grade math homework or simply getting her kids out of bed in the morning. It didn’t have to be where it ended.

* * *

The idea came in stops and starts. The first night, when she dug through his old writing, was when she thought that it would be a shame that all his writing should go to waste.

The day the kids went back to school was a lonely one.

Pip was the only one home, and he was still taking naps, so a lot of the day was Eliza, knocking around the house on her own. The second part of the idea came when she saw an article light up Alexander’s phone. She still charged it every night, kept paying the phone bill, hadn’t changed a single thing about it. It was slightly annoying - the Twitter notifications, the news alerts, the sound of her own missed calls - but it was familiar.

Eliza glanced at the phone, about to dismiss the alert from the House Floor, but it wasn’t that. It was a new article from the Washington Post, but the name struck her. It took a minute, but Eliza realized that it was one of the journalists who had been embedded with the campaign - he’d won a Pulitzer Prize for his piece about the cabinet appointments.  
She remembered him. Remembered how he had encouraged the Hamiltons to insist that their family had a right to not be in the press, back when it was just Phillip and Angie and AJ. Eliza felt an intense rush of gratitude for him and others like him. She wished that she’d been more expressive of that. She wished that she could help them, somehow.

The last part, the linchpin of what would become the next fifty years of her life, came a few days after that. All her children were home except for Angelica, because Angie was still in college, even with how dissociative she had been after her father’s death.

“Daddy!” Pip cried. It was silent except for the TV in the background and everyone’s heads snapped up.

There he was, muted stock footage of Alexander, on the screen. The anchor was talking about the circumstances of his murder, about the investigation, and Eliza rushed to mute the TV so that her children wouldn’t hear about their father’s murder, but the tool tip at the bottom of the screen remained before she could change the station.

_What is Alexander Hamilton’s legacy?_

And it struck her, like she’d hit her funny bone and couldn’t quite shake the tingling. What was her husband’s legacy? He had been obsessed with it, and it had irritated Eliza to no end, but now, it was something they would have to deal with. Because it wasn’t just his legacy, she realized. It was all of them. AJ had already been accepted into college, but James and John and William and Lizzie and Pip - the rest of their lives would be determined by the connotation of “Hamilton.”

She remembered his papers, and it was such a shame that no one could see them. The very next instant, when she turned the TV onto some movie the Disney channel was playing, she realized what she needed to do.

In the age of information, there was no reason to leave the reporting to the journalists. Eliza didn’t have the gift of words that Alex did, but she could give the sympathetic ones something to write about. She could write her own history, one that showed Alex as the man he was, faults and virtues, rather than a vile adulterer or a tragic martyr.

It came in an onslaught, and Eliza seized an empty notebook that seemed to populate every room of her house. She scribbled down names and topics, newspapers and tentative essay titles. Her children noticed her frantic energy, and for a moment it felt like their father was back.

Eliza, for her part, wondered if this was how Alex had felt all the time.


End file.
